The Death Of Instant Messenger
I still use AIM. That's right. I am an AIM user. This apparently makes me old. The kids today, with their Facebooks and Gchats and beeboos or whatever it's called, they laugh at me when I tell them I use AIM. Oh, you should hear the mockery and disrespect, the snickering. It burns, the way they do an imitation of me using a walker. Some of them have even asked me what AIM is. Anyway, I have been content, in my stubborn, fogeyish way, to remain on AIM even as my group of contacts moves on to the newer, flashier thing. It is a kind of digital natural selection, I guess. So learning that "AIM is effectively dead" isn't exactly shocking, but there is something a bit disheartening about the finality of it all. What will I do now? Anyway, excuse me, I need to go wind my watch.
my buddy list would beg to disagree with the assertion in the linked piece, but then again, tech blogs aren't really known for their 'reporting' skills.
At least you're not on IRC.
@deepomega MOO
Oooh, another former IRC-er. See you at the 50th VAX-system BBS reunion?
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
@DoctorDisaster
>Go
>You can't go.
@deepomega What's so wrong about having an IRC window idling in the background all day HMMM
Jesus, animated GIF buddy icons. I've just been thrown through a time vortex to the feeling of making crudely sexual icons in ImageReady while pretending to work in the high school computer lab.
I still use AIM (but also gtalk).
I don't IM at all.
@major disaster I don't either. And I am not very good at emailing. And I have a pretty selective and insular list of facebook "friend" type folks too. Pretty much I fail at the future.
@major disaster me either… well, I do use the FB IM feature now and then, just not a "real" IM client. And at the risk of sounding like "that guy", I think I'm the last person in North America not to use Twitter.
Don't feel bad, Balk. I'm so old, I never got into using AIM because I remember how much time I used to fritter away on IRC.
A girl I was desperately in love with used to modify the color of the background and the fonts of her AIM profile. She would hide secret messages by writing them in the same color as the background; they'd be made visible by hitting "Select All." How many sleepless nights did I spend wondering if those secret flirty messages were directed at me (almost never) or one of the many prep school juiceboxes she ran around with (almost always). Ah, AIM.
I have a question. A recent guest at my house was quite upset that I had no WIFI. She claimed that providing guests with wireless access was as necessary to being a good host as providing clean towels. I have a desktop, which she was welcomed to use, but clearly had her nose bent out of shape. Does no wireless internet make you a bad host?
@dado As long as you make up for it with an unlimited supply of ivory backscratchers, I think you're in the clear.
@dado Your guest was being a douche.
The more they complain they need it, the less they actually do.
@dado You should have told her to check into a hotel. And then pay for it.
The best part about AIM in it's infancy was the wealth of screennames one would accumulate before settling on one. I know there were upwards of 8 for me, but i particularly remember one that was somehow a nod to my Limp Bizkit fandom, as well as Watrboy120, in homage to the Adam Sandler feat of cinematic brilliance. I finally settled on Rozy2004, the standard nickname(in this case an awkwardly embarassing spelling of it)/graduation year combo. Which made it awfully difficult to e-hit on seniors as a sophomore, and remarkably easy to e-hit on sophomores as a senior. High School is decidedly not awesome.
@Andy Rosenberger Ugh, and yet! My childhood screenname was TymBoD, because TimBoD was already taken. (Revelation: my name is Tim.) I put TimBoD on my buddy list, so that if s/he ever came on, I could desperately plead to trade names or something. No dice.
@Andy Rosenberger One of my friends developed a near-pathological level of AIM-secrecy that, in the days before 'invisible,' led to an almost overwhelming plethora of aliases, all of which, of course, remain on my buddy list. It was like being friends with a member of Team Rocket.
doesn't everyone in editorial still rely on AIM to get work done?
Does anyone else remember actual AOL before the buddy list, when you had to just IM each person to see if they were online? Or is this just a memory I invented?
I wooed my future wife on AIM back in the late nineties/early 00's! Somewhere on a backup hard drive I've got a couple of the good ones saved away…
people still log into AIM? why not use Meebo? and consolidate all of your various IM clients on a single browser tab? sheesh…
I'm sticking with AIM. Even my work IT department laughed at this. But you know what? There are a lot of assholes on Gmail and Facebook who are practically strangers and I don't want to talk to them. AIM is the one area where an old, faddish screen name has prevented me from being found by every tom, dick and harry.
I still use AIM, if only because I love to be called Captaintootall.
Don't shoot me dead, I'm just the Instant Messenger!